Greater Than Our Doubts |09.03.23 | Power pt.4
Mark 5:21
Pastor Erik Anderson
I invite you to open up your scriptures this morning to Mark chapter five. We’re gonna be in Mark chapter five beginning in verse 21. So in the seat back, a little like cage thing underneath your chairs, you can grab a Bible.(…) If you don’t have your own or you can open up your phone, use your Bible there, or if you brought your own, that’s great. We’re gonna be in Mark chapter five beginning in verse 21. We are three weeks into a series on the power of Jesus. We’ve been marching through Mark and this section of Mark focuses on Jesus’s power. A few weeks ago, Pastor Drew preached a sermon from Mark chapter four where Jesus calms a storm that has swept him and the disciples up while they cross the Sea of Galilee. Last week, we heard from Mark chapter five about a man who was demonized, had a legion like 6,000 demons possessing him, and that Jesus actually released him from those demons. We saw that Jesus has power over the spiritual world. And here we have a third story in that series talking about Jesus’s power. And we hear this story about faith, death, and healing beginning in verse 21. This is what the scripture says. “When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered around him and he was by the sea. Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named Jairus came and when he saw him, fell at his feet and begged him repeatedly, “My little daughter is at the point of death.(…) Come and lay your hands on her so that she may be made well and live.” So he went with him. And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. Now, there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for 12 years. She had endured much under many physicians and had spent all that she had and she was no better, but rather grew worse.(…) She had heard about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak. For she said, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.”(…) Immediately her hemorrhage stopped and she felt in her body that she had been healed of her disease.(…) Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?” And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowds pressing in on you. How can you say who touched me?” He looked around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him and told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace and be healed of your disease.”
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While he was still speaking, some people came from the leader’s house to say, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?”(…) But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue, “Do not fear, only believe.”(…) He allowed no one to follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. When they came to the house of the leader in the synagogue, he saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. When he had entered, he said to them, “Why do you make a commotion weep? The child is not dead, but sleeping.”
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And they laughed at him.(…) Then he put them all outside and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him and went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her, “Taleetha, kum,” which means “little girl, get up.” And immediately the girl got up and began to walk about. She was 12 years of age.
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At this, they were overcome with amazement. He strictly ordered them that no one should know this and told them to give her something to eat. This is the word of the Lord.
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Thanks be to God.
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Well, something has happened in our community recently. You’ve probably heard the news. I’m pretty sure it was on the front page of the paper, although we don’t get the paper in the physical format. But it’s been big news, especially if you’re a lady or if you’re a guy who is inclined to decorating your home. You know the good news. A store has recently opened just down the street of the church here. You know that the Hobby Lobby has opened here in Sterling. And what a great time for Hobby Lobby to open, right? That it’s right before fall starts, so they can open up and they have all these fall decorations ready to be purchased. So I don’t know if you saw the pictures of that first day that it was open, but the parking lot was packed.(…) Packed full of cars of people purchasing home decorations.
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Many of you maybe have already gotten out to the fall decorations in your home. I know that I even talked to a few of you who said that you have. I’ve been to a couple of homes that have had the fall decorations already unpacked and out when the weather has been 95 to 100 degrees the last two weeks.
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I don’t know if maybe you’ve seen this. We have a couple of walnut trees in our yard and maybe you’ve noticed that the walnuts or even some of the oaks in the area, the leaves have begun to change.(…) They were green. Now they’re kind of yellow. Our walnut in our yard is kind of shedding some of the broken and old branches that are falling on the ground.
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And just a couple of days ago, we had a day of 75 degree weather and everybody was outside having a great time.(…) Oh, one last thing.(…) Coffee shops in the area all have this flavor that comes around every year. Pumpkin spice, pumpkin spice, everything. I was even just told this morning that Arthur’s has pumpkin spice cheesecake, pumpkin spice, frozen yogurt, everything pumpkin spice now when the weather is 95 degrees outside.
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All of these things that we can see,(…) Hobby Lobby selling fall decorations, Arthur selling pumpkin spice flavored everything, even the cold weather, not cold weather, the cooler weather some days, the leaves turning the fall decorations getting out. These are evidence.(…) They’re clues that something is about to happen,(…) that fall is coming.
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You and I may not be able to see fall with our eyes yet.(…) We may not be able to feel it with our bodies because certainly our sweat glands are telling us it is still hot outside, unseasonably warm. We have had a long summer of dry,(…) hot weather, unseasonably dry, unseasonably hot. I think earlier this year we had 35 plus days of no rain.
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But we all know that fall is coming,(…) not only because the pattern that we know that the weather changes and we know every year that fall happens no matter what, but we have these clues,(…) these little pieces of evidence. Pumpkin spice lattes, pumpkin decorations out on the Welcome Center. Maybe some of you have gotten your cold weather clothing started to get that unpacked and laundered and ready to go. We see evidence that fall is coming.
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Now today we’re going to talk about faith. This story is all about Jesus’s power and the faith of the people in it. And when we talk about faith,(…) many times what we in the church and even people outside the church, secular people, what we talk about when we talk about faith is simply belief.
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In fact, it’s actually blind belief. Have you heard this before?(…) We’ve heard encouragement that even though we can’t know something is true, we’re told just have faith.(…) Just believe that it’s true anyway.
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Oftentimes even the critics and enemies of Christianity will oftentimes hurl accusations that this is what faith is. It’s actually believing in something that there is no evidence for,(…) that it’s silly and foolish to do so.(…) Believing in something that we don’t have evidence. And in fact, if we have evidence for something, it can’t be real faith.
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There are some people who believe that faith simply has to do with mental ascent.(…) It has to do with us knowing a certain set of facts. Even some Christians talk about it this way, where they have what’s called the age of accountability.(…) Where after you have a certain mental preparedness, you are now liable for your sins where before you were not. It’s almost like some Christians and even some secular people believe that humans are just like brains on a stick.(…) The most important thing about us is what happens in between our ears. The things that we can know and believe then.
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Well, scripture actually gives us a definition of faith. I don’t know if you know this, but in the letter to the Hebrews, the author, we don’t know exactly who the author is, but the letter to the Hebrews is a letter written to Jewish believers.(…) This is soon after Jesus was crucified, resurrected, ascended into heaven, and the believers are gathering together in the church, and there was an author who wrote a letter to Jewish believers. And this is how this author talks about faith in Chapter 11 of Hebrews. Don’t flip there. We’ll just be here for a second. They say this now. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen. We have these two key words here, assurance and conviction.(…) The word assurance literally means the title or deed to something. So like you have the title of your car, proving that you own it, that’s what this word means.(…) It’s a title or a deed to property, to animals, whatever it might be. So the writer to the Hebrews under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit tells us that faith is actually the title. It’s the proof that we have of things hoped for.
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It’s the proof that we own what’s hoped for.
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And also it says the conviction of things not seen. This is where our translators of the NRSV that we use here kind of get it wrong and don’t actually do it justice, because that word literally means evidence.
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The word conviction here literally is the word evidence.
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We’re told that faith is the assurance or the proof of things hoped for, that we own something that’s hoped for. And it’s the evidence of things that we cannot see.
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We cannot see fall yet,(…) but we can go get a pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks.
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That’s the evidence.
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Fall is coming. Even if we can’t see it, it is well on the way. The evidence is all around us. The leaves turning. Those few days that we get where it’s cooler, we can begin to smell the fall in the air. The decorations.
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The pumpkin spice flavoring.(…) These are evidences of something. That we can know something is going to happen in the future because of what we can see now.
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Faith is knowing that fall is coming because we can see the evidence around us, and then adjusting our behavior accordingly.
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You see, faith from the biblical perspective actually has to do with trust.
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It’s trusting in the things that we have been told that we can see and that we can trust in our Lord. It’s not just mental assent. It’s not just knowing the right facts, but it’s actually adjusting our behavior, adjusting our lives around the things, around the evidences that we can see.(…) We have faith in fall, and we are beginning to make decisions by changing our behavior and changing our values based on this truth.
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So now as we head into this story, I want you to keep that in the back of your mind.
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We’re not going to go over this whole story again, like I usually like to go verse by verse, just because it’s so long, but I just want to rehash some of the details. That we begin here in verse 21, that Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side.(…) In Mark, I’ve mentioned this before in some of the earlier sermons that we did while we were going through Mark, that the Gospel of Mark is almost like the newspaper comics, where there are these one-paragraph stories, kind of like a family circus comic, that it gives you some sparse detail about something in Jesus’ life, and we can learn a lot from just this one little snippet of a story. Many of the stories in Mark, when they’re side by side, don’t really have much to do with each other. Mark will just be like, “And then this happened.” They’re not really connected in a kind of a chronological linear way. They’re just side by side, because maybe they have something to do with each other, maybe not, but they’re just these snippets of stories that tell us about Jesus Christ.(…) These three stories, this is the last one that we’re looking at today, all are connected in time by this sailing across the Sea of Galilee. First, the few weeks ago, a passage drew, preached on when the disciples and Jesus crossed the Sea of Galilee, and the storm came up, and Jesus was asleep on the boat. Once they got to the shore on the other side, that’s when this demonized Gentile man came up, and Jesus delivered him from the demons.(…) Now they’re coming back across the sea, and they get to the other side. So these three stories all have to do with each other. As they get back to the other side of the sea, the crowd gathered around him, and one of the leaders of the synagogue by the name of Jairus came to him and pleaded with him. “My daughter is dying. She’s on her deathbed, a 12-year-old girl, and she’s not going to make it.” Jairus had definitely heard of Jesus. Jesus probably even preached in his synagogue. Jairus, being the leader of the synagogue, wasn’t quite the same as being the pastor of a church,(…) because he may or may not have been a teacher.
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Mostly, his job was to organize the life of the synagogue. So he made sure that worship services happened on Saturdays. He made sure everything was running smoothly. Everybody in this community would have known Jairus. Everybody would have known him. He was a pillar of the community. They all would have known him by name. They would have recognized him and his family. So Jairus is pushing up through the crowd and gets to Jesus and begs him to heal his daughter.(…) Jesus obliges and says, “Of course, they probably knew each other before they’d probably met.” So Jesus begins to head to Jairus’s house. While on the way to Jairus’s house, he’s pushing through the crowds, and there was a woman who had this hemorrhage for 12 years. We don’t know exactly what this would have been. It could have been like a skin hemorrhage, or it might have been a menstrual bleed or something like that. But we know that this woman had been bleeding for 12 years, which if you remember from last week, that made you ritually unclean. If you touched blood, you were ritually unclean. It wasn’t that you were sinful. It just means that you were associated with death,(…) and things that are associated with death cannot be in the same place that the God of life can be. So if you have a loved one who died and you had to take care of their body, do all the funeral rituals, all that kind of stuff, you were ritually unclean. You had done nothing wrong. You had done a normal good thing to do, but you just had to go through the process of becoming clean, then to enter into the temple, to enter into the house of the Lord, to give your sacrifices and those kinds of things. So this woman had been afflicted for 12 years with this bleeding.(…) And that also means that she couldn’t even be part of the worshiping community.(…) She couldn’t go to the temple. She couldn’t enter the synagogue because if she touched somebody else, she would also make them unclean.
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And she sees Jesus going through the crowd,(…) and she sneaks up behind him.
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And when she had heard about Jesus, she came up and she touched the hymn of his cloak.
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For she said to herself, “If I but touch his clothes,(…) I will be made well.”
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We see this woman do this risky, maybe even dangerous thing.
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Maliciously sneaking up behind Jesus, she’s richly unclean, and she knows that she touches him, he becomes richly unclean.
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But she wants to risk it anyway, because she needs to be healed. She needs that healing. And she didn’t want to interrupt. She was just a lowly woman, no social standing that we know of. She’s been unclean for 12 years, mostly outside of the community. And here she reached out and touches his clothes, doing the risky thing.
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Then we have this beautiful moment where Jesus calls her daughter.
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He says, “Daughter, your faith has made you well.
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Be healed.” And she’s healed.(…) She is healed of this disease that had afflicted her.
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After he has this beautiful moment with this woman, he continues on to Jairus’ home.
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They get told on the way there that Jairus’ daughter is dead, and the arrangements have been made. So when Jesus shows up, he shows up to this crowd of people who are mourning Jairus’ daughter. And in this culture, they would actually have professionals that would come and mourn with your family. Because it was right and good to mourn after somebody died. So they would hire people to come and they would assure that the person was dead, because they don’t want to waste the money, right? They would assure the person is dead, and then they would have these weepers and whalers come and attend to the family, to cry with the family, to be present with the family while they’re grieving, kind of like counselors might be today. They would go and be with the family. And Jesus meets all these people, and then of course he has this great moment where he says, “Oh, she’s not dead, she’s just sleeping.” And they all laugh at him. They actually scorn him because of his statement. They know for sure. Death is their business. They know for sure this girl is dead.(…) And he goes into the room with Jairus and Jairus’ wife, and Peter, James and John, three of his key disciples, and sure enough, he brings this girl back from the dead.
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She is dead.(…) Fully dead, full stop.
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And he brings her back from the dead with a word.
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And everyone is amazed and overcome with joy. And then Jesus does the typical thing. He does a mark and just says, “Hey, keep it under wraps for now.
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Keep it quiet for now.” Jesus wants to wait to make sure it’s the proper time for everything to be revealed.
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So we have this beautiful story of Jesus’ power.
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We see in the storm in chapter 4 that Jesus is powerful over the physical world. We see at the beginning of chapter 5 that Jesus is powerful over the spiritual world. And then we have this story where we see that Jesus is powerful even over death itself.
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Death is the most inevitable thing that we have in our lives.
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We know for a fact that the only guarantee is death. Some people say death in taxes, but we all know we can get out of taxes, right? If you have enough money, you can get out of it, right? But death is inevitable. The moment you are born, you know you are going to die. That is the only thing that you know for sure is going to happen in your life, is that you will die.
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But even the inevitable cannot stop Jesus.
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Even the power of death is weak compared to the power of Jesus. Now for many in this room, you probably grew up in church. You probably heard this story before, or you’ve heard stories like it. The death of Lazarus, Jesus healing people. This is all very familiar.
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But if we can just kind of like take off the glasses of familiarity for a moment.
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Can you understand how unbelievable this story sounds?
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How unbelievable it is that this young girl was dead.
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This young girl had died and Jesus reached down into the grave and pulled her up out of it. Brought her back to life.
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For those of us who are familiar with this story, our eyes kind of gloss over a little bit.
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Because we’re so familiar with this truth that Jesus is powerful even over death.
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But imagine hearing this for the first time.
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Imagine hearing this with the worldview that death is in fact the final word and nobody can escape it. This is unbelievable, isn’t it?
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But Jesus invites us, like he invited Jairus,(…) to do not fear,(…) but have faith.
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What’s the proof? What’s the evidence that we have of this?
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What we have in this passage is we have this amazing event where Jesus interacts with a known and respected community leader named Jairus. Jairus being the leader of the synagogue.
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Everybody would have known Jairus. Everybody would have known he was the leader of the synagogue. And these stories that we have in Mark are recorded and put together just years after Jesus is crucified.
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We know that Peter, most of these stories are from Peter’s point of view. And so John Mark, who wrote the Gospel of Mark, probably was one of Peter’s disciples. And he helped Mark collect and put together these stories into this Gospel that we have.
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Even the most conservative dates of the Gospel of Mark are about 60.
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So by 60, we had this collection of stories almost exactly as we have it here.
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That’s just a few years after Jesus’ death around 30. That means these stories were being told and were being taught for the years leading up to that.
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And here we have these names,(…) Jairus, Peter,(…) James, and John. These people were all still alive when the first Christians were hearing these stories. These people were all still alive when the disciples were going out and proclaiming the good news of Jesus.
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I don’t know those of you who went to college. You probably remember when you were writing a research paper, you had to do this thing called citation. You know what I’m talking about? Whereas you’re writing your research paper, if you come to a sentence and you make a claim about something, you have to have a little one at the end of that sentence. And then down at the bottom of the page, you have a little one and you have to say, “This came from this book,(…) this author on this page.”
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You have to kind of prove everything that you state is true by referencing somebody else who’s smarter and has done the work and those kinds of things, right?
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That’s what these names are.(…) All throughout the gospel, these random people are named.
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And essentially, this naming of Jairus is saying, “Hey, if you want to know if this is true,(…) go talk to Jairus.(…) He’s the leader of the synagogue in Capernaum.(…) They just named him right there.”(…) And this story would have been floating around just a few years after Jesus was crucified and resurrected and ascended into heaven.
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When we hear these names in the story,(…) Peter, James, John, Jairus, Jairus’s wife,(…) their references,
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“Go check my work.(…) Go see if this is true.”
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And so then somebody could go to Capernaum, could say, “Hey, I’m looking for Jairus, leader of the synagogue.” And they’d be like, “Yeah, sure, go talk to him. He’s right there.” “Hey, did your daughter die?” “Yeah, my daughter was dead, but Jesus brought her back to life.”
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That’s the evidence.(…) That’s the citation. That’s the truth. And same thing with the demonized man from the last story, last week, even though we don’t have his name, it wouldn’t be that hard to go to the place of the Gerasenes, which is listed in that chapter, and be like, “Hey, was there a guy who had a lot of demons and he lived in the tombs?” They’d be like, “Oh, yeah, that was Richard down the street. You should go talk to him.”
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These stories are so incredible and so unbelievable(…) that our gospel writers are inviting the hearers to go and talk to these people.
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Now, 2,000 years later, we don’t have the benefit of being able to go and talk to these people.
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But we can see here that there are references, citations,(…) truth,(…) proof, evidence that these stories are true.
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That’s why Peter is named all over Mark. That’s why the gospel of Luke starts off with Luke writing a little note to the guy who paid Luke to go write the gospel and the book of Acts. And Luke starts off by saying, “Yeah, Theophilus, that’s this guy. Everything that you have heard is true. Here’s my corroboration.” And Luke took the time to go around and talk to people like Jairus and actually rerecord all of these stories, because he was saying, “Yes, Theophilus, yes, the things that you have heard are in fact true. I’ve gone and made sure myself.”
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So we have several generations of people checking these stories
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and we’re invited like Jairus to not fear,(…) but to trust.
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This word here,(…) Jesus says, “Do not fear, only believe.” That word, “believe,” is the word for faith.
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Trust in Jesus.
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These stories are true.
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Jesus is in fact who he said he was.
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He is the Son of God, God incarnate, the one sitting at the right hand of God, the Son of man who ascended onto God’s very throne. He is the one who defeated death, who could not be held down by death.
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And we can know he has power because we see the evidences of it. Not only in the scriptures themselves, but also in our own lives, in the miracles that we experience, those moments in our lives where we have no peace and he gives us peace, those moments in our lives where we are confronted with something as sure as death and the Lord rescues us out of it. These are evidences that although we can’t see,(…) we can know it’s true.
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We can know the Lord is good to his word, that we have a proof, we have a deed that we own what the Lord has given us. All the spiritual blessings in the heavenly places are ours. We know it’s true because we can call on the Lord and he gives them to us.
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We are invited to be like this woman who was bleeding for 12 years,
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this “daughter” as Jesus calls her,
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who had the boldness to just reach out and grab his cloak,
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who took the chance, who had the risk, because she had seen that it was true, that Jesus is powerful to heal.
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And so we trust like this woman,
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reaching out and grabbing Jesus by the hem of his cloak,(…) knowing that he gives us all the good things that we need.
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And then he, just like that woman, looks at us and calls us daughters and sons of the Most High.
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Amen. At this point, we’re going to have our worship team come forward and we’re going to have a song of reflection,(…) a time where we can reflect on the goodness of our Lord Jesus as we’ve heard him in his Word.